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At that time Jesus said, ‘I thank you, Father,
Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise
and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such
was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father;
and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except
the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

Matthew 2:1-12 Epiphany has come to be known as the celebration of the three kings’
encounter with Jesus, only in this text there are only two kings, and neither
of them are the Magi. Our passage begins “in the time of King Herod”, and I translate, “In the
time of a notorious authoritarian demagogue, enormously wealthy and notably
insecure, a ruler obsessed with his reputation, who both taxed the people
extensively and offered extensive job creation on vast construction projects
throughout the kingdom designed to build up his name. Herod was a sovereign answerable
to a foreign government, who spent lavish sums of money building up his own
private empire and secure fortresses, whose rule was characterized by security
measures aimed at suppressing the people’s contempt for him and keeping them
from speaking out, and whom history remembers for both for his successes and
his tyrannical despotism, in that time…” In the time of that “king”’s
rule, comes another king. A baby, born amidst a bit …